Musing on book piracy

[sholio]

The Internet is talking about e-book piracy and there are some really interesting posts on it.

Here is a roundup of some of them: http://troisroyaumes.dreamwidth.org/38222.html

I think the thing that really struck me, reading through these links, is that I had never realized how pressing the issue of access to books can be in the majority of the world (even in my own country, among people who can't afford books or have easy access to libraries). This is fairly naive and it isn't a very nice thing to realize about myself, but I had really never considered it in any depth at all. I had honestly never thought about -- or at least not sat down and connected to book piracy -- the problem of getting English-language books in countries that aren't majority English-speaking, or the cost of buying foreign books when most of the books that your friends are talking about are foreign (American or British) books, or getting affordable books at all in countries that don't have well-developed publishing industries (often because, oh look, bestselling American books have all the prestige, and no one is willing/able to invest in local publishers). I mean, I grew up poor but I also grew up awash in cheap and free books. I have no experience at living somewhere that isn't true.

My own thoughts on piracy are, well. Conflicted. *g* As a creative person who would like to make a living at creative endeavors, I am all for writers and artists being paid for what they do, especially if they own their own work and all or most of the money goes to them! But I am also well aware that I produce a luxury item, and I feel like it's kind of entitled of me to throw a fit about someone getting it for free rather than spending money on it that they can't afford. ("Don't want to pay for it? Don't read my book then" is not an answer I'm prepared to give somebody. I'd much rather have them read the book!)

And I would be a total hypocrite anyway, because I pirate things myself, according to a sort of weird complicated algorithm of "this is okay, but this isn't". I want to emphasize that I don't want to sound like I'm standing in judgment on people whose pirating algorithm works differently from mine. I'm not in your shoes; I don't know what your budget looks like. I do know that I never pirate books, or first-run movies, or whole seasons of shows that I could get on DVD or from Netflix. Things that I pirate basically fall into one of a few categories:

- Current episodes of TV shows, or individual episodes that I need for some purpose but don't want to buy the whole season to get (like for making songvids)
- Songs that my flist puts up for download or gives to me on mix tapes
- Things that would be prohibitively expensive for me to buy (like 50 volumes of a manga series, say) that I can't get from a library or Netflix
- Things I can't buy in my country or in my language

Generally I think of myself as a pretty ethical pirate; I pay for things whenever I can, especially making an effort to buy things from self-publishers and other creator-owned efforts, and don't feel too bad about it otherwise. (All right, yes, there are pangs of guilt, and I go through periods when I'm trying to buy legit copies of everything I've pirated lately, but mostly I just try to be as ethical as I can in other areas of my life and don't sweat it too much.)

But what had never really hit me until reading these above-linked posts is just how much my own "ethical" piracy is driven by access and cost. I don't pirate books not so much because of any moral high ground, as much as I might like to pretend so, but because I'm surrounded by cheap (used) or free (library) books. If I can't bring myself to pay $30 for a new hardcover, all I have to do is wait a few months and I can probably get it in paperback or from the library or as a $1 used book on Amazon or borrow it from a friend. And there is plenty to read in the meantime. Ditto for movies -- I never pirate first-run movies, it just feels too weird, but I can figure that in six months or so I'll be able to put them in my Netflix queue.

But when I don't have that kind of cheap, reliable access, off I go to the pirates, yarrrr. I read the entire run of One Piece online, even though I did feel guilty about that one, because I wasn't willing to shell out $500+ to buy all the manga (I do have some of it and I keep telling myself that I'm going to start buying the rest, but ... it keeps getting pushed to one side by other things I haven't read yet). Luckily my library had most of FMA, so I was able to get it from there and buy the volumes they didn't have, but I read the last batch of chapters online because I wasn't willing to wait. (I do plan to buy it, but again, I haven't yet.) And I could purchase most current TV shows from iTunes, but I rarely do, unless I'm really into the show and want to send a clear message to the studio that I'm supporting it. Part of the reason for that is because I don't want to hassle with DRM, which makes it impossible to play the files on our main playback device or take clips for songvids. But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't partly because I can get nice-looking, instant clean copies for free.

Most people I know are precisely that kind of "ethical" pirate -- we may all have different standards for what we pay for and what we don't, but we choose our downloads with the same kind of care that we choose our purchases (I really want to see this, but I can wait 'til it's on DVD; I want to know what my flist is talking about with this, so I'll download it now; oh, I downloaded it but I didn't really get into it, so I'm not going to buy it when it's released here) and we watch or read everything -- or almost everything -- we download, and talk it up to our friends if we like it. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I buy WAY more music, DVDs and other media-related goodies than I would if piracy didn't exist. Nearly everything I buy for entertainment these days is discovered through either checking it out for free via download, or seeing my flist talk about it.

But I think the elephant in the room is that lots of people aren't like that, and those of us who consider our own downloading behavior more-or-less ethical would like to pretend that the publishers don't have a point in some ways, and that everyone who downloads stuff is as careful and thoughtful about it as we are. But that is just not true. The world is FULL of people who can totally afford to pay for things but simply don't, because they can get them for free. I worked with a guy, for example, who had never paid for a song or a movie in his life. His hard drive at work was choked with music he'd downloaded -- the entire collected work of hundreds and hundreds of singers. At home, he had hard drives full of movies. He just torrented everything he was remotely interested in, and it wasn't like he couldn't afford to buy it. I've known people who could easily afford a movie ticket who torrented movies the day they showed up in theaters, and video games the day they went on sale.

I truly don't think piracy is inherently wrong, especially given the very good arguments about limited access made in the posts that I linked to above (I really do think you ought to read or at least skim them, and the discussions too!). I think intellectual "property" law is a complicated ugly mess that doesn't really have a whole lot to do with the way things actually work in the real world. And this is not even getting into the whole area of social legitimacy, where buying a used book or borrowing a book from a friend is no different from piracy as far as the author getting paid, but has a well-established social and legal place in the bookworm world simply by virtue of being around for hundreds of years. It's not like there is some clear-cut line between piracy and not-piracy, or that everything legal is equally good for the author (or that piracy is across-the-board bad).

And furthermore, it's a fact that piracy is here to stay, so it's a question of figuring out how to work with it rather than stomping it out, because that doesn't work.

Like this person said in this post:

Look, if you're writing for a living, then writing is a business. People don't pirate books unless they want to read them; if they want to read your books, they are your readers; if they are your readers, they are your market. If your business is failing, it makes absolutely no sense to scream at your market for not paying you money. It's a bad idea because you run a risk of alienating potential readers.

But I feel that for those of us who do think that piracy is okay under this or that circumstance, it's questionable to completely ignore the "I can get everything for nothing!" people when we make our own arguments, because they are totally out there, and there are a lot of them.

And I also feel uncomfortable with the pro-piracy side's tendency to malign authors as a bunch of entitled whiners for complaining about book piracy, because they are, mostly, either self-employed people who are scraping along very close to the poverty line, or working at jobs they don't want in order to make a living while writing books on the side. And I am not just being altruistic here! More authors being able to make a living means more books for ME! So I want authors to be able to make a living at it, or at least make enough money to continue feeling like it's worthwhile to put their books out there. I hope that a lot of the people who pirate books -- and I'm not saying it's wrong for you to do so! -- will also occasionally buy one even if it's crazy expensive, or buy some of the author's merchandise or drop a few bucks in their website tip jar if they have one ... and maybe cut them some slack when they go off on pirates, because yeah, I wish that EVERY author would read this and this and especially this, and would catch a clue that most people who download their books are not trying to screw them over. But some totally are. And it's their livelihood that's at stake, in a changing industry and a shaky economy, and they're understandably scared about it.

So ... um, yeah. I guess that I am firmly in the middle of the fence here. I can see both sides' point of view, and I hope all of this made some kind of sense. What do you think?

ETA: Oh! One more thing, but I think it's an important thing, especially if you backtrack the linkspam to the author posts who started the whole round of piracy debates this time. In this case, I have seen either apologies to their readers or a promise of "I'll think it over, thank you" from all of the authors involved, and a couple of them making "thank you" comments on the linkspam posts, as well. And I wanted to mention it because a) I think they deserve a hat tip for it *tips hat*, and b) I've been seeing more and more of that kind of thing when these kinds of discussions go around -- apologies, and people in the more-privileged position stepping back and saying "I'm sorry" and taking a look at where the other person is coming from. I know twice isn't necessarily a pattern, but it actually happened the last time someone was criticized for writing a *ist story too (in Inception fandom, I think), and I do actually feel like there has been a change, that people are truly listening and learning and becoming more respectful of each other by having these discussions (as contentious and ugly and awful as they can sometimes get). I know that I have learned a TON by listening to my flist and talking about things like this with all of you, and I'm obviously not perfect and I still have a temper (I had a fight with someone over the weekend that I'm still feeling guilty and sensitive about), but I think that I have learned a lot about conflict management and apologies and basically just being a better, more open-minded human being by talking to all of you. So thank you. ♥

Comments

[torachan]

Well, but the unethical pirates are everyone's focus, so when we try to talk about other circumstances, I don't really feel the need to bring up people who download everything even if they can easily pay. I'm aware that they exist, though I don't believe they are the majority*. I don't feel like I need to preface every conversation with "yes, there are some people who download just to download". (And even then, I don't think those people necessarily mean a lost sale, because they download far more than they would ever buy if they were paying money for it.)




*And if you're really talking on a global scale, they are most definitely not the majority, since pirated DVDs and CDs in poorer countries are a much larger source of piracy than people downloading at home.

[sholio]

See, I totally agree up to a point, but then ...

I mean, yes to the global thing (which -- and this is absolutely my own US-centricism talking -- I really had not thought about on this level before), and yes, I get that it's a well-worn straw man that is always trotted out by publishers and authors, but ... even though it's used as a straw man, I don't think that it is entirely made up either, and I start to get uncomfortable with the way that so many of these discussions seem to assume that authors have no basis whatsoever to complain, that they're simply being paranoid and distrusting.

For one thing, the fact that downloading is as huge and widespread as it is makes access much easier for people like me, who are on the fence about a lot of it -- who might pay, and probably could pay, but ... well, like the One Piece thing. I'm not trying to blame other people for my own actions; I'm just saying that widespread piracy, and a social climate in which pirate links are easy to find, makes pirating easier for people who otherwise might pay for it. I believe that I spend much more on CDs, DVDs, etc than I would in a world without digital piracy, but that's averaged over a whole bunch of individual instances and some of them don't work out in the author's favor.

And I'm not saying that it has to be brought up in every post or every comment, but if it's never brought up, it starts to feel to me like it weakens the whole argument -- an argument I otherwise agree with! -- by ignoring evidence that doesn't support the case.

[torachan]

A lot of things don't work out in the creator's favor. I mean, you could just as easily say that widespread use of secondhand merchandise makes it easier for people to pay less (and to buy things in a way that does not benefit the creator at all) when they might otherwise have bought new.

In the end, I think the fact that secondhand sales and piracy make things accessible to many people who would otherwise be unable to access them at all outweighs the fact that some people who could afford not to also take advantage of those things.

[sholio]

I totally agree! And like I said in my post (though it was buried in a slew of tl;dr) the main difference with secondhand stuff is that it has social legitimacy because people have been doing it for hundreds of years. (I mean, there are obviously other differences too, but as far as putting money in the author's pocket, it doesn't do anything except in the exact same indirect way piracy does.)

But I also don't think creators are entirely misguided for being worried, because the industry is in flux and especially for someone who's gotten used to making money a certain way, it's got to be terrifying to have that model start changing around them. And both sides can trot out statistics (which are mostly made up or based on biased models) to support their point of view, but really, no one knows for sure what is going to happen or even what is happening now. Basically I come down a lot more strongly on the pro-piracy, I'd-rather-have-my-book-read-than-out-of-print side, but it's just the way my own ethics swing -- I know of no compelling statistics to back up either side, so I'm reluctant to dismiss the author/anti-piracy point of view just on the basis of my own moral conjecture about how the whole thing works.

[ratcreature]

Mostly I would like if the practice of calling it "piracy" stopped, because whether it is ethical or not, or ultimately looses the creators money or not, copying a digital file in violation of its copyright is not the same or equivalent as seizing a ship and kidnapping or killing the crew to steal cargo or as it is in more modern piracy to blackmail the owners to extort money. It is misleading, and IMO needless inflaming.

[sholio]

Ha, yes, this is an excellent point and something I hadn't even really thought about; it's (a little bit, in some ways) like calling something "rape" when you really mean "mildly screwed over", isn't it? An unnecessarily severe and inflammatory word for a very innocuous act. And terminology affects the way that people think about a thing; "piracy" sounds much worse -- and gets people more up in arms -- than "copying".

[ratcreature]

Yeah. Or in reverse it makes light of actual piracy. I mean, it has gone so far that the first thought with "piracy" is either file copying or ridiculous Disney pirates, and that even though every other week it seems some tanker or container ship is seized for ransom. For example in my local news there was a headline about a piracy trial going on, and it took me reading the sub-header to realize that for once they weren't after some torrent site, but that it was an actual trial of a Somali pirate.

It's not that can't see the point that the ease with which everyone can multiply digital content at little cost is a challenge to monetizing said content, and may threaten some business models or even industries, but talking about that with the goal of finding rational solutions for livelihoods is not helped by this kind of language. It's as if you tried to talk about a problem of speed limits being widely ignored, where social norms also don't always match the law, then have the still fairly reasonable thesis that this leads to unnecessary traffic deaths, but your rhetoric is all about vehicle murderers running amok.

[elf]

It works both directions. "Piracy" implies acts of great destruction and theft, immoral and utterly indefensible ... at the same time it taps into the myth of the noble rebel, casting off the shackles of bureaucracy and the oppression of the wealthy powermongers. One side denounces the other as pirates; the other proudly claims the label. It's a term that works excellently well to bypass any rational aspects of the discussion.

Recently, I've been using the term "unauthorized copying;" that avoids stating that it's always illegal or harmful, and it doesn't make the people doing it instant antiheroes.